Nobody Rides For Free Page 10

  As we passed the occasional rainbow flag, Shane pointed out that those buildings were gay guest houses that catered to a mix of Canadians, Europeans, and men from cold climates in the states. “They’re part of the reason why gay kids hang out here,” he said. “The owners can be kind, and the tourists take pity on the kids.”

  I drove slowly, looking at the occasional empty lots for places where kids might hang out. Every so often, I saw a cluster of palm trees that looked like a good place to crash, especially after dark when there wouldn’t be much street light.

  “Pull up over here,” Shane said, pointing to a spot across from a building under renovation. It was Art Deco-style, with eyebrow windows and a vertical sign, that looked like it belonged on one of the side streets of South Beach. “This is where Dorje might be crashing.”

  There were surprisingly few people on the street around us, considering we were only a couple of blocks inland from the beach. “One of the kids told me Dorje made a deal with the contractor here,” Shane said. “He can crash at night and on weekends as long as nobody in the neighborhood sees him coming and going.”

  The building was surrounded by a chain link fence with a padlock, and I wondered if the contractor had given Dorje a key.

  Shane looked around. “Down there at the end,” he said. “See the way that Dumpster is placed beside the fence? And how there’s a big plastic trash can on the other side?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s probably Dorje’s front door. Follow me.” We walked up to the Dumpster and Shane looked around to make sure no one was watching us. Then he hopped up onto the top of the can, caught his balance for a moment, then vaulted over the chain link fence and onto the other can.

  I followed him up and over the fence. “Interesting,” I said as I landed beside him on the sparse grass. “You’re sure he lives here?”

  “Nope. But if he’s not here, he’s somewhere like this.”

  We walked along the fence, in the shade of the palm trees, as we approached the building. “If he’s here, he may be asleep,” Shane said. “We don’t want to be rude.”

  A flicker of movement from a second-floor window caught my attention. “He’s awake,” I said, though I wasn’t sure who I had seen at that window. “And watching us.”

  “Good. Then we can hang out here and wait for him to join us.”

  A couple of plastic chairs rested in the corner where the building met the fence, and Shane and I sat down there. A moment or two later, a slender dark-haired guy stepped out of the building’s side door, wearing a pair of faded Bermuda shorts and a loose tank top. “Make yourselves at home,” he said.

  I was struck by the guy’s beauty, if that’s what you want to call it. His skin was a few shades lighter than Yunior’s, like a solid tan, but with a tinge of brown. He had an oval face—broader at the cheekbones and narrower at the chin and forehead—and deep-set dark eyes. He could have stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine.

  “Hey Dorje,” Shane said. “This is my friend Angus.”

  Dorje inclined his head slightly, put his palms together, and said, “Namaste.”

  I repeated his motions, and felt as if I was about to begin a yoga class. “Namaste.”

  “Angus works for the FBI,” Shane said. “He’s looking for an older man who may be victimizing teenage boys. Yunior said you might know something about him.”

  I stood up and showed Dorje the picture.

  “He calls himself Frank. He hangs around the beach sometimes, looking for boys.” He smiled. “They have to be very good-looking, though.”

  Dorje was very aware of how handsome he was. He was the kind of guy you sometimes see at Wilton Manors’ gay bars, who broadcasts a “look, don’t touch” vibe, expecting everyone to admire him. I hated the way guys like that made Jonas, and others like him who weren’t picture-perfect, feel.

  I disliked Dorje, from his vibe to the phoniness of his yoga greeting, but I had to rein in my feelings to get information about Ozzy and Dimetrie. “You know any way to reach Frank?”

  Dorje shook his head. “I don’t want that kind of darkness in my life. Haven’t seen him around for few weeks. He must have enough boys for now.”

  “You think they’re all boys?” I asked. “Underage?”

  “If they’re over eighteen, then they sure don’t look it,” he said.

  I showed him the pictures of Ozzy and Dimetrie. “You know either of these two?”

  “I know Ozzy. I’m the one who told him to look up Shane. You’re saying he went with Frank instead?”

  “I think so.” I told him about the video I’d seen, and went overboard in describing how Frank had violated Ozzy, trying to see if I could get a reaction from Dorje.

  “That’s hella sucky,” he said. “Dudes like that should get their nuts cut off.”

  It was interesting to see Dorje drop the whole “cooler than you” attitude. Maybe he wasn’t bad after all.

  I handed him my card. “If you see Frank again, or hear where he could be, will you get word to me?”

  “If I’m still here. I might not be around much longer. My destiny is on a fashion runway.”

  “You model?”

  “I’ve been trying to break in, but I don’t have the cash for the headshots and all that crap, and I’m not going to let somebody take advantage of me.” He struck a haughty pose and I could see him strutting his stuff in some of those weird-looking clothes you see in magazines.

  “Good luck with that,” I said. “And call me if you hear anything.”

  Shane and I walked back down along the wall. “You think he knows how to get in touch with that guy Frank?” I asked Shane.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Dorje’s got a lot more going on than he wants to admit.”

  • • •

  As I drove Shane back downtown, neither of us said much. It was interesting that the sexual tension between us was gone. Was that my fault? In being too focused on the case, had I missed some signs from Shane?

  Or maybe, as I kept insisting to Jonas, I wasn’t so cute that every guy I met wanted to get into my pants.

  I pulled up in front of Lazarus Place. “Thanks for your help this afternoon,” I said.

  “I want to find Ozzy,” he said. “I care about those kids, you know? It hurts me when one of them gets into trouble.”

  He opened the car door. “If you find him, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”

  “Of course. And it’s not ‘if’ it’s ‘when.’ I’m sure of that.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find him someday. I just worry what shape he’ll be in.”

  He got out of the car and I watched him walk up the concrete path. Was he afraid I’d find Ozzy dead? Or that Ozzy would be so messed up from being abused that he couldn’t recover?

  The front door opened and one of the kids I’d met reached out for Shane and dragged him inside. He had his job, and it was up to me to find Ozzy and Dimetrie and any other boys who might be being abused at the same place. I only hoped I’d be able to find the source of the flakka, too, to justify all my involvement in the search for the boys.

  14.

  Gruesome Find

  Monday morning I was determined to spend some time looking for the source of the flakka. Not just to keep Roly happy—but in case there were other guys out there like Brian Garcia who might be taking a mix of drugs that would drive them crazy.

  I kept a computer window open with the webcam URL, and checked it periodically, but got no results, so I spent most of the morning on an FD302 about my meetings that weekend, and going back over everything I had found. I even drew a diagram with Gay Guys LLC at the center and spokes running off it for each piece of information that connected to it.

  Alexei Verenich’s name stuck out. Could he be Frank, the guy Dorje said was out cruising for boys to perform in the videos? I went looking for his photo online, even though the picture on his website didn’t match the photo of the man in the videos. But if he was the regist
ered agent for the business where Frank worked, he had to know Frank, didn’t he?

  I’d promised Katya that I wouldn’t interview Verenich until she’d had a chance to put her case together, but I could still research him on my own. I went back over his law firm’s website but I didn’t see any mention that his company had LLCs or other types of shell corporations.

  What could I discover if I called the phone number listed on the website? I’d need a decent cover story in order to learn anything. I remembered the first bar Katya and I had visited on Friday night. It had been full of Russians. What if I pretended one of them had referred me to Verenich’s office?

  “Good morning,” I said, when a woman answered the phone. “I need to set up an LLC in order to purchase a condominium in Sunny Isles Beach. A guy I was talking to at Tovarich the other night referred me to Mr. Verenich.”

  “We are not taking new clients,” the woman said in a heavy Russian accent. “Sorry.” She hung up.

  I sat back in my chair. Not a very friendly attitude. Did that mean that Verenich worked only for clients he already knew? Or was his office merely a front for illegal activities? What else could I discover without affecting Katya’s investigation?

  There was nothing on his website about his personal life. If I discovered that Verenich was gay, for example, or lived in Wilton Manors, I could make a stronger connection to the porn operation, beyond his acting as the registered agent for the LLC.

  I copied his head shot and pasted it into Google’s image search. A bunch of results appeared, and it took a couple of minutes to scan through them until I found one that looked like it matched. The photo was of a man standing beside a sport fishing boat, holding a huge fish in his hands.

  The site that hosted the picture was titled Alexei’s Fishing Blog. Though it never indicated his last name, the Alexei who ran the blog was an avid sport-fisherman, and owned a fifty-three foot Hatteras yacht, with long fishing poles attached to the sides. He bragged about his abilities to handle big fish, and the one he was holding was labeled as three feet long, with a weight of fifty-two pounds.

  I zoomed in on the picture of him holding the fish. He was bare-chested, and on his right breast, I saw a tattoo in the Cyrillic alphabet. I’d heard somewhere that members of the Russian mafia sported a lot of tattoos.

  My brain kept buzzing with connections. Katya had indicated there were members of the Organizatsya involved in her money laundering case. If this man’s tattoo was indeed one that Russian mafia members sported, it could be a very strong connection for her.

  I copied the picture of the man holding the fish, then cropped it to focus on the tattoo. I uploaded the cropped image and once again had to sift through a lot of results. Many images of bare-chested men with similar tattoos over their hearts or on their arms. One man even sported the tattoo on his back above his waist, like a tramp stamp.

  What a strange and wondrous place the world was, I thought, as I kept skimming through the photo results. I stopped at an article from the previous Friday’s Palm Beach Post. The headline read, “Beach Walker Stumbles over Gruesome Find.”

  Longtime Palm Beach resident, Stanley Gummer, has found many interesting and unusual items walking along the beach from his home on Seabreeze Avenue for the last twenty years, but Thursday morning was the first time he discovered a dead body.

  “At first, I thought it was just a big pile of junk and seaweed,” Gummer said. He collects unusual pieces of driftwood for his son-in-law, who was a sculptor. “But when I got closer, I saw a human foot sticking out. I called 911 right away.”

  Police responded and uncovered the naked body of a Caucasian male, approximately fifty years of age. His hands had been chopped off at the wrist, and his face had been damaged during his time in the water. The only identifying characteristic was a Cyrillic tattoo on his chest, which police translated as “communism only produces victims.”

  Forensic examiners noted that the man’s dental work is consistent with work performed in the former Soviet Union. Anyone with information about this man is urged to contact the TIPS line for the Palm Beach Police Department.

  I went back to the picture of Alexei Verenich and the fish he’d caught. He looked to be the right age, and the tattoo matched. Then I looked up the registration for his boat, and found that he kept it at the Sunny Isles Marina. Was the boat still there? Or was it lost somewhere at sea?

  Had he gone out fishing, and fallen off the boat and drowned? That wouldn’t account for his hands being cut off. I went back online and found that if you took a boat out about five or six miles offshore, which was very reasonable for sport fishing, you could hit the Gulf Stream.

  Suppose Verenich had gone out that far to fish, and someone on board with him killed him, cut off his hands, and tossed him in the water. Once the gases in his body began to expand after death, he’d float to the surface.

  From a meteorological site, I discovered that the Gulf Stream moved at about five miles an hour. Then I checked with the Coast Guard. There was no record of Verenich or his boat being reported as missing.

  I called Katya and told her what I’d found. “Bozhe moi!” she said.

  “Why don’t you call Verenich’s office?” I asked. “See if his secretary will talk to you?”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  A few minutes later, she called back. “It took some coaxing, but I was able to get her to talk,” she said. “He hasn’t come to work for more than a week, and she can’t reach him. She’s very worried.”

  “Well, we might know where he is,” I said. “How would you feel about a road trip?”

  15.

  Road Trip

  I picked up Katya outside the office where she was working. “I want to make a quick detour before we head north,” I said. “Do you know how to get to the Sunny Isles Marina?”

  She directed me down Collins, past a row of high-rise towers that completely blocked the view of the ocean. “Turn right at the Epicure Market. There’s a shortcut back there that will take us out close to the marina.”

  I turned where she suggested, and we cruised along North Bay Road, past yet another line of fancy condos, this set fronting Biscayne Bay. The narrow lane was lined with towering palms and flowering plants, without the hustle and bustle of A1A.

  “What made you start looking into Verenich?” Katya asked.

  I told her that I’d been trying to make more connections between Verenich and the porn case, and how I’d done some image fiddling.

  “And this detour to the marina?”

  “If the local cops already know who he is, they’ll have impounded the boat,” I said. “That is, if it’s there. And if they haven’t…”

  “Then we can look around,” Katya finished. “Good idea.”

  We came out on the 163rd Street Causeway, and the vast expanse of the bay spread out to the north and the south. “Don’t cross the bridge,” Katya said. “Stay to the right and go under it.”

  We drove beneath the arching bridge, the Intracoastal to our right, and I pulled up at the entrance to the Sunny Isles Marina. The parking lot was empty and a fence with a locked gate surrounded the property.

  Four long, skinny concrete docks stuck out into the bay, with a mixture of boats docked in pairs between even narrower wooden finger piers. The air was much more humid by the water, and I took a couple of deep breaths. A steady, warm breeze blew salty air from the ocean, and the sun glinted off the decks, the condo towers, and the mix of powerboats and sailboats tied up along the finger piers. Halyards clanked on the sailboat masts and the bridge reverberated with idling cars and trucks.

  You didn’t get days like this in Scranton.

  I pulled up a photo of Verenich’s boat on my phone and we walked along the outside of the fence. “There it is,” I said. It was all white, with a line of dirt or mold above the waterline. The name on the transom was Bolshaya Ryba, with “Sunny Isles Beach, Florida” beneath it.

  “It means Big Fish,” Katya said, when
I asked her to translate.

  Beyond the transom was a well with chairs and fishing rods, and the tall poles I’d seen in the photos online. An interior cabin and a metal ladder led up to a covered platform. Katya pulled out a small pair of binoculars from her purse and peered forward.

  After a moment, she handed them to me. “Look at the transom,” she said. “What do you see there?”

  I focused the binoculars on a pattern of tiny brown specks. They could have been dirt—it didn’t look like Verenich was very particular about how he kept his boat. Or, they could have gunk from the last fish Verenich caught. Or something else.

  When I put the binoculars down and looked at Katya, it was clear she had the same idea I did. “Blood,” I said. “Verenich’s?”

  We walked back to the car. “If that’s Verenich’s blood, then someone had to take him out on the boat and kill him,” I said. “Then bring the boat back.”

  “The article you read didn’t mention a cause of death, did it?” Katya asked.

  I shook my head as we got into the Mini Cooper. “I figured we could get that information from the police more easily if we went up there.”

  “I agree. Though we should call and find out who the detective is and make sure he or she is available to talk to us.”

  I waved my arm in her direction. “Make it so.”

  “Very Jean-Luc Picard,” she said, as she pulled out her phone. “Are you a Star Trek geek?”

  “Not particularly. I just like pop culture.”

  While she made the call, I concentrated on getting us headed in the right direction for I-95. Traffic along 163rd Street West was heavy and again I found myself wondering why there were always so many people out on the roads in Miami in the middle of the day.

  Growing up in Scranton, every adult I knew worked a day job, either in the mining industry, stores, or offices. When we went on the occasional school field trip it felt like a real holiday and traffic was always light. Our only rush hour was a short time in the morning and the evening, with the occasional backups where two highways intersected. But in Miami, the highways were always crowded, and any slight problem could cause a huge delay.